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I saw a similar effect in Perl::Critic. When I first got commit, it seemed like Jeff took a short breather. When Elliot joined, I couldn't keep up with his energy and had to work just to keep up with the commit emails let alone the code. Now, I've been gone from P::C so long that I feel I'll have to relearn a lot just to make a contribution.

I had a related experience trying to contribute to Rakudo. I was trying to learn Parrot, Perl6 and Rakudo at the same time and the ground kept moving underneath me. That was exciting to watch, but hard to track, and I chose to set aside my own Perl6 work until a few more features were ready for me -- now it's been 8 months since I touched it...

The Planet project (the software behind Planet Perl, etc) went through this several times -- with the Jeff Waugh generation, the Scott James Remnant generation and the Sam Ruby generation. Each time the code changed dramatically for the better but most participants were just trying to keep up until the end of the burst of code, when the bug reports and patches and test cases started coming in. I think the bug reports do slow down the "alpha"

This effect happens even in commercial code, but it's much more muted there because developers have a fixed time budget instead of tuits, so there a smaller disparity between "alpha" and the masses.